Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By : David Ringstrom
Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By: David Ringstrom

Overview of this book

David Ringstrom coined the phrase “Either you work Excel, or it works you!” after observing how many users carry out tasks inefficiently. In this book, you’ll learn how to get more done with less effort. This book will enable you to create resilient spreadsheets that are easy for others to use as well, while incorporating spreadsheet disaster preparedness techniques. The time-saving techniques covered in the book include creating custom shortcuts and icons to streamline repetitive tasks, as well as automating them with features such as Tables and Custom Views. You’ll see how Conditional Formatting enables you to apply colors, Cell icons, and other formatting on-demand as your data changes. You’ll be empowered to protect the integrity of spreadsheets and increase usability by implementing internal controls, and understand how to solve problems with What-If Analysis features. In addition, you’ll master new features and functions such as XLOOKUP, Dynamic Array functions, LET and LAMBDA, and Power Query, while learning how to leverage shortcuts and nuances in Excel. By the end of this book, you’ll have a broader awareness of how to avoid pitfalls in Excel. You’ll be empowered to work more effectively in Excel, having gained a deeper understanding of the frustrating oddities that can arise daily in Excel.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Improving Accessibility
6
Part 2:Spreadsheet Interactivity and Automation
12
Part 3: Data Analysis

Highlight cell rules

The Home | Conditional Formatting | Highlight Cells Rules submenu offers eight different options. I’ll discuss the first seven here and then cover the More Rules command later in the chapter in the Custom rules section. I’ll demonstrate the Greater Than and Less Than rules, and then briefly discuss the other rules, since all are applied in the same fashion. The Greater Than-Less Than-Between worksheet in the example workbook has three rules applied to cells D6:D25. Let’s first apply the Greater Than rule to the Work Area section of the worksheet.

Greater Than

As you may expect, the Greater Than rule allows you to apply formatting to cells that contain numbers or dates that are greater than a specific value. Let’s assign a color to every road that is greater than 8,000 miles:

  1. Select a range of cells, such as J3:J22, on the Greater Than-Less Than-Between worksheet in this chapter’s example workbook, as shown in Figure...